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[T4keD0wN]

Are you assuming megalights is implemented if the game has a cvar for it?

That only suggests the build of unreal engine it's running on. Nothing more. Nothing less. This has to be enabled in the project setting during dev and each light source should also be set to "Allow Megalights" for it to function as such.

Wuthering Waves and FateKeeper (which is not a shipped game, technically) seem to be right. Not sure about Directive 8020

EDIT:

And it doesn't even do anything on FateKeeper?

So yeah. We got Wuther Waves, basically.

No, i check if the cvars are enabled else it indeed be in every single UE5.6 game as setting in the engine.

So enabled for project is the most important one, if that says 0 then you can always pretty much disregard the actual subsettings if the project isnt compiled with it, there's nothing to be done about it as the game doesnt have it, then theres one more key one that says if its enabled (typically allowed as you said) along with hw/sw switches, those tend to be changeable so it doesnt matter much, but you can tell if a game uses it or not at specific graphical settings, well, you also have to check the main rt project ones are enabled too. Rest are just specific configuration.

Checking for whats flagged and for overrides is something i cannot do as a user tho, which is a major problem with this.

Fatekeeper is compiled with it, you should be able to edit it through console, yeah it wont do much for the game given it's nature. 99% sure Directive has it but haven't messed around with console there to edit it as ive played it with PT, so i could very well be wrong on this one, but they didn't keep all default values there if i recall correctly, so i assume it's a on with lumen, could however be they've planned it at some point and cut it tho. (8020 was UE5.5, i am not sure what build it got pushed into UE, ill try to check how it is with it in 5.5 versions, i remember there even being an override at some point). Lets cross off 8020 for now, cuz i am not 100% certain.

 

[ChiefDada]

 

[Wishmaster92]

The only person that fully understood it at DF was Alex and he doesn't seem to be around anymore. Now the rest are likely trying to take some time to wrap their heads around the new tech. Given its performance characteristics, it's likely to get mass adoption on all UE5 games going forward. May even become the default setting for direct lights. And given the direction of travel with other game engines, like Rage, ND and Snowdrop, others are likely working on ray traced direct lighting as well. And to see all that running on base consoles at 60 is just *chef's kiss". You essentially have ray traced unlimited direct lights (megalights), ray traced indirect lights (lumen GI) and ray traced reflections (lumen reflections). The only difference between this and basic path tracing is the unified path, which requires 3x to 6x more bounces. But if RT performance next gen is 10x or above, and AI can simulate additional bounces at the fraction of the cost, like Neural Radiance Caching, PT at 60 fps is a near lock. It's the natural next step, which means the future is really bright.

If only they had a good denoiser for lumen... Without RR, I'm afraid the game is going to boil quite a bit.

Yeah I'm worried about that too. Megalights is probably another temporal graphical technique that is dependent on accumulation of frames. I just hope it's not that bad during gameplay. I'm sure halo will have a 30fps fidelity mode so I wonder if it would be more or less noticeable since it has less frames to work with? Either way this is the next big breakthrough in graphics visually.

From what I understand this is what megalights does; last gen games were only capable of around 3 shadowcasting lights in a scene, this generation let's be generous and say it went up to 10 which is probably much less. More Shadow casting lights in a scene completely tanks frame rate. Megalights introduces hundreds of shadowcasting lights in a scene, sometimes thousands. This almost feels like some offline render graphical technique. Area lights is what almost always gets downgraded in graphics when the final game releases. Tlou part 2 2018 e3 demo for sure had more area lights than the final game. Cyberpunk 2018 demo also had way more area lights than the final game, even In raytraced mode. Not that raytracing/path tracing has anything to do with the amount of area lights, you're still confined to whatever limit if you're not using megalights. Basically games can now have that tech demo look in the shipped product if they're using this.

First screen is just showing time of day is the same

 

[viveks86]

No, i check if the cvars are enabled else it indeed be in every single UE5.6 game as setting in the engine.

So enabled for project is the most important one, if that says 0 then you can always pretty much disregard the actual subsettings if the project isnt compiled with it, there's nothing to be done about it as the game doesnt have it, then theres one more key one that says if its enabled (typically allowed as you said) along with hw/sw switches, those tend to be changeable so it doesnt matter much, but you can tell if a game uses it or not at specific graphical settings, well, you also have to check the main rt project ones are enabled too. Rest are just specific configuration.

Checking for whats flagged and for overrides is something i cannot do as a user tho, which is a major problem with this.

Fatekeeper is compiled with it, you should be able to edit it through console, yeah it wont do much for the game given it's nature. 99% sure Directive has it but haven't messed around with console there to edit it as ive played it with PT, so i could very well be wrong on this one, but they didn't keep all default values there if i recall correctly, so i assume it's a on with lumen, could however be they've planned it at some point and cut it tho. (8020 was UE5.5, i am not sure what build it got pushed into UE, ill try to check how it is with it in 5.5 versions, i remember there even being an override at some point). Lets cross off 8020 for now, cuz i am not 100% certain.

It was introduced as experimental in 5.6 iirc. Production ready only in 5.8. It's likely the devs backported the feature to play around. The actual lights in the game don't behave like it is on. Wuthering Waves backported it too i think, but only after it became production ready. Agree that we should cross out 8020.

 

[viveks86]

Yeah I'm worried about that too. Megalights is probably another temporal graphical technique that is dependent on accumulation of frames. I just hope it's not that bad during gameplay. I'm sure halo will have a 30fps fidelity mode so I wonder if it would be more or less noticeable since it has less frames to work with? Either way this is the next big breakthrough in graphics visually.

From what I understand this is what megalights does; last gen games were only capable of around 3 shadowcasting lights in a scene, this generation let's be generous and say it went up to 10 which is probably much less. More Shadow casting lights in a scene completely tanks frame rate. Megalights introduces hundreds of shadowcasting lights in a scene, sometimes thousands. This almost feels like some offline render graphical technique. Area lights is what almost always gets downgraded in graphics when the final game releases. Tlou part 2 2018 e3 demo for sure had more area lights than the final game. Cyberpunk 2018 demo also had way more area lights than the final game, even In raytraced mode. Not that raytracing/path tracing has anything to do with the amount of area lights, you're still confined to whatever limit if you're not using megalights. Basically games can now have that tech demo look in the shipped product if they're using this.

That's an accurate understanding. Megalights is Epic's solution to the "many lights problem". ReSTIR DI (aka RTXDI) does the same thing. It's technically even more advanced than megalights, but more performance hungry as well. Megalights and ReSTIR DI (now a part of ReSTIR PT, which combines ReSTIR GI for indirect bounce) are essentially competing solutions to the same rendering problem that plagued realtime graphics for decades. And you are right that devs can now go wild with how many lights they can place in a scene. Every room in a skyscraper across a cityscape, for example, could be an individual shadow casting light and it wouldn't kill performance. Extend that to every vehicle on a crowded street, every street light etc.

Pretty much every engine will have something similar built in the next year or two. ReSTIR DI is opensource, so anyone can build their own variant that works well for them. It's going to make a huge difference in cutscene versus gameplay differences as well as most "reveal versus final game" downgrades over the next couple of years. What we see initially would be much closer to what we finally get because devs don't need to butcher the scene lighting to squeeze out more performance.

 

[Rheon]

A random NPC from AC Black Flag Resynced. What I noticed at first was the way her hair animated so beautifully, but then I realised her fidelity was overall surprisingly high.

(Ignore the shitty stone thing to her left )

 

[T4keD0wN]

Yeah I'm worried about that too. Megalights is probably another temporal graphical technique that is dependent on accumulation of frames.

Yes, it is. But i wouldnt worry too much about it as with reflections, with lighting the denoiser and filters in unreal do a good enough job.

I just hope it's not that bad during gameplay. I'm sure halo will have a 30fps fidelity mode so I wonder if it would be more or less noticeable since it has less frames to work with?

More you accumulate the more stable it is (less boiling and flicker) you get, but you risk ghosting, there will always be a tradeoff that lean more in one direction with this, devs cant avoid that unless they use RR which does a better job, but even that is just an improvement. The amount of accumulation is not tied to your actual framerate devs set that number themselves separately (idk how its on xbox/ps, maybe they set it for each mode)

If they accumulate 15 frames (should be very close to a realistic amount btw, but itll probably be a tiny bit less) and you get 30 fps then it retains half a second vs you getting 60fps when it covers 1/4th of history, faster is better. More frames will feel more responsive, less ghosty.

 

[SlimySnake]

Have to say that there are at least some things Yotei does right. They have a really cool fog simulation that rolls in at times and covers grass and distant mountains. There were some artifacts in the 60 fps pssr version that made it look kinda blocky, but in the 30 fps mode the fog looks really beautiful.

It takes PS4 era lighting and gives it a thicker volumetric look i saw in Silent Hill 2 and AC Shadows. Several areas deeper into the story feature insane volumetric fog everywhere. The actual assets and geometry inside some castles is pretty much ps3 era which is very disappointing.

 

[ChiefDada]

I've seen enough... Yotei shits all over Horizon for open world traversal fidelity. I didn't even remember how janky HFW mount was. Very annoying to capture for comparisons.

 

[SlimySnake]

Nassau looks so fucking good. The wooden huts and houses use planks lifted straight out of UE5. this is closest ive seen any other engine come to matching nanite. It's marvelous.

What's even more impressive is that at night time, they light the island with candles and fire, and everything around those lights gets a very realistic glow up. I am sure ive seen lamps and lights do dynamic lights before, but this feels like a cut above.

The cutscenes also look great. Not all the time, but again the lighting is just so good at times it feels like a cg movie. Had they redone the motion capture, i think it wouldve felt very close to a cg movie.

Some screenshots below. The conversion from hdr is clipping all the detail but man this cutscene looked insane.

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